NATASHA ANDERSON (AU)
Residency period: May – August 2022
During my stay at La Becque, I started research on a new project, Dirty Ice, reading an inordinate amount of glaciology papers, consulting with glaciologist Ian Delaney at Lausanne University, and undertaking documentary field trips to far flung erratics and rapidly melting alpine glaciers. My interest was in the shifting relationship between how glacial entities themselves write – how they process and inscribe time, space, climate and human nature – and how they are written culturally – across Western art, science, religion and politics.
This initial period of reading led to narrowing my focus onto three major shifts in Western temporal-spatial perspective; the Swiss ‘discovery’ of the ice ages in the early 1800s, inscribed in erratics from Sion to Neuchâtel; the Cold War turn to ice coring and the ways in which glacier ice processes climate; and our contemporary attempt to write the future through glacial descriptions of climate change.
Gathering multiple cultural and natural writing processes related to these three historical shifts, I began work on what will eventually be both a concert performance (a live music-video essay), and a publication (essay, score, images). The workings of a three-part score were sketched, translating and transcoding between cultural/natural writing processes and sonic writing systems to variously mediate states of stasis/flow, information deformation, and wave-form hybridisation. — Natasha Anderson
Natasha Anderson is a composer, musician, and interdisciplinary artist. She makes instrumental, audio-visual and acousmatic works in a variety of forms; from solo performance and notated scores, to installation and multichannel diffusion. One of her primary interest lies in creating idiosyncratic, preternatural electronic sounds from acoustic sources, and exploring the relationship between these and their live physical source in composition.